An optimization approach to group coupling in heterogeneous collaborative systems

ABSTRACT

Recent proliferation of computing devices has brought attention to heterogeneous collaborative systems, where key challenges arise from the resource limitations and disparities. Sharing data across disparate devices makes it necessary to employ mechanisms for adapting the original data and presenting it to the user in the best possible way. However, this could represent a major problem for effective collaboration, since users may find it difficult to reach consensus with everyone working with individually tailored data. This paper presents a novel approach to controlling the coupling of heterogeneous collaborative systems by combining concepts from complex systems and data adaptation techniques. The key idea is that data must be adapted to each individual's preferences and resource capabilities. To support and promote collaboration this adaptation must be interdependent, and adaptation performed by one individual should influence the adaptation of the others. These influences are defined according to the user's roles and collaboration requirements. We model the problem as a distributed optimization problem, so that the most useful data--both for the individual and the group as a whole--is scheduled for each user, while satisfying their preferences, their resource limitations, and their mutual influences. We show how this approach can be applied in a collaborative 3D design application and how it can be extended to other applications.

REFERENCES

• 1: Ronald Azuma , Yohan Baillot , Reinhold Behringer , Steven Feiner , Simon Julier , Blair MacIntyre, Recent Advances in Augmented Reality, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, v.21 n.6, p.34-47, November 2001 [doi>10.1109/38.963459]
• 2: Lukasz Beca, Applications of XML and Customizable Components in Building Virtual Places on the Web, Proceedings of the 9th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, p.242-247, June 04-16, 2000
• 3: K. H. Britton , R. Case , A. Citron , R. Floyd , Y. Li , C. Seekamp , B. Topol , K. Tracey, Transcoding: extending e-business to new environments, IBM Systems Journal, v.40 n.1, p.153-178, January 2001
• 4: C. D. Cera, T. Kim, J. Han, and W. C. Regli, "Role-based viewing envelopes for information protection in collaborative modeling," J. of Computer-Aided Design, Elsevier, vol. 36, pp. 873--886, 2004.
• 5: Carlos D. Correa , Ivan Marsic, Software Framework for Managing Heterogeneity in Mobile Collaborative Systems, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, v.13 n.5-6, p.603-638, December 2004 [doi>10.1007/s10606-004-5065-5]
• 6: Michael Deering, Geometry compression, Proceedings of the 22nd annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.13-20, September 1995 [doi>10.1145/218380.218391]
• 7: Eyal de Lara , Rajnish Kumar , Dan S. Wallach , Willy Zwaenepoel, Collaboration and multimedia authoring on mobile devices, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services, p.287-301, May 05-08, 2003, San Francisco, California [doi>10.1145/1066116.1066126]
• 8: Prasun Dewan , Rajiv Choudhard, Flexible user interface coupling in a collaborative system, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Reaching through technology, p.41-48, April 27-May 02, 1991, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States [doi>10.1145/108844.108851]
• 9: S. K. Feiner, "Augmented reality: A new way of seeing," Scientific American, vol. 286, no. 4, pp. 34--41, April 2002.
• 10: Steven Feiner , Henry Fuchs , Takeo Kanade , Gudrun Klinker , Paul Milgram , Hideyuki Tamura, Mixed reality: where real and virtual worlds meet, ACM SIGGRAPH 99 Conference abstracts and applications, p.156-158, August 08-13, 1999, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/311625.311941]
• 11: James D. Foley , Andries van Dam , Steven K. Feiner , John F. Hughes, Computer graphics: principles and practice (2nd ed.), Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1990
• 12: A. Fox, S. D. Gribble, Y. Chawathe, and E. A. Brewer, "Adapting to network and client variation using active proxies: Lessons and perspectives," IEEE Personal Communications, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 10--19, 1998.
• 13: Armando Fox , Steven D. Gribble , Eric A. Brewer , Elan Amir, Adapting to network and client variability via on-demand dynamic distillation, Proceedings of the seventh international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, p.160-170, October 01-04, 1996, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
• 14: Thomas A. Funkhouser , Carlo H. Séquin, Adaptive display algorithm for interactive frame rates during visualization of complex virtual environments, Proceedings of the 20th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.247-254, September 1993 [doi>10.1145/166117.166149]
• 15: Carl Gutwin , Saul Greenberg, Design for individuals, design for groups: tradeoffs between power and workspace awareness, Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.207-216, November 14-18, 1998, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/289444.289495]
• 16: Robert W. Hall , Amit Mathur , Farnam Jahanian , Atul Prakash , Craig Rassmussen, Corona: a communication service for scalable, reliable group collaboration systems, Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.140-149, November 16-20, 1996, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/240080.240238]
• 17: T. H. Höllerer, S. Feiner, D. Hallaway, B. Bell, M., Lanzagorta, D. Brown, S. J. Julier, Y. Baillot, and L. J. Rosenblum, "User interface management techniques for collaborative mobile augmented reality," Computers & Graphics, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 799--810, 2001.
• 18: Hugues Hoppe, Progressive meshes, Proceedings of the 23rd annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.99-108, August 1996 [doi>10.1145/237170.237216]
• 19: James P. Ignizio , Tom M. Cavalier, Linear programming, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1994
• 20: S. Julier, M. A. Livingston, J. E. Swan II, Y. Baillot, and D. Brown, "Adaptive user interfaces in augmented reality," Proc. Workshop on Software Technology for Augmented Reality Systems, Tokyo, 2003.
• 21: M. Klein, H. Sayama, P. Faratin, and Y. Bar-Yam, "What complex systems research can teach us about collaborative design," Proceedings of the 6th Int'l Conf. Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD-2001), 5--12, 2001.
• 22: Michael J. Knister , Atul Prakash, DistEdit: a distributed toolkit for supporting multiple group editors, Proceedings of the 1990 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, p.343-355, October 07-10, 1990, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/99332.99366]
• 23: Du Li , Rui Li, Transparent sharing and interoperation of heterogeneous single-user applications, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 16-20, 2002, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA [doi>10.1145/587078.587113]
• 24: Wai Yip Lum , Francis C.M. Lau, On balancing between transcoding overhead and spatial consumption in content adaptation, Proceedings of the 8th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 23-28, 2002, Atlanta, Georgia, USA [doi>10.1145/570645.570675]
• 25: I. Mani, Automatic Summarization. John Benjamins Publ. Co., Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2001.
• 26: Daniel Marcu, The Theory and Practice of Discourse Parsing and Summarization, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000
• 27: Silvano Martello , Paolo Toth, Knapsack problems: algorithms and computer implementations, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 1990
• 28: Moving Picture Experts Group. http://www.mpeg.org
• 29: Brian Noble , M. Satyanarayanan , Morgan Price, A Programming Interface for Application-Aware Adaptation in Mobile Computing, Proceedings of the 2nd Symposium on Mobile and Location-Independent Computing, p.57-66, April 10-11, 1995
• 30: Atul Prakash , Hyong Sop Shim, DistView: support for building efficient collaborative applications using replicated objects, Proceedings of the 1994 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.153-164, October 22-26, 1994, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States [doi>10.1145/192844.192895]
• 31: Thomas Phan , George Zorpas , Rajive Bagrodia, Middleware support for reconciling client updates and data transcoding, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services, June 06-09, 2004, Boston, MA, USA [doi>10.1145/990064.990083]
• 32: Doug Schaffer , Zhengping Zuo , Saul Greenberg , Lyn Bartram , John Dill , Shelli Dubs , Mark Roseman, Navigating hierarchically clustered networks through fisheye and full-zoom methods, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.3 n.2, p.162-188, June 1996 [doi>10.1145/230562.230577]
• 33: Shervin Shirmohammadi , Abdulmotaleb El Saddik , Nicolas D. Georganas , Ralf Steinmetz, JASMINE: A Java Tool for Multimedia Collaboration on the Internet, Multimedia Tools and Applications, v.19 n.1, p.5-19, January 2003 [doi>10.1023/A:1021120828421]
• 34: M. Stefik , D. G. Bobrow , G. Foster , S. Lanning , D. Tatar, WYSIWIS revised: early experiences with multiuser interfaces, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), v.5 n.2, p.147-167, April 1987 [doi>10.1145/27636.28056]
• 35: Web3D Consortium. VRML97 and Related Specifications. Online at: http://www.web3d.org/x3d/specifications/vrml/
• 36: Eric A. Wernert , Andrew J. Hanson, A framework for assisted exploration with collaboration, Proceedings of the conference on Visualization '99: celebrating ten years, p.241-248, October 1999, San Francisco, California, United States
• 37: Makoto Yokoo , Katsutoshi Hirayama, Algorithms for Distributed Constraint Satisfaction: A Review, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, v.3 n.2, p.185-207, June 2000 [doi>10.1023/A:1010078712316]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures

  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.5 Heterogeneous Databases

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
3D content adaptation, CSCW, coupling, heterogeneous systems